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Catching Throwables implies catching Errors in addition to Exceptions, which is considered to be a bad practice as Errors usually indicate a fatal situation (i.e. out of memory or the like) that you don't want to communicate to the client.
I think that you're using assertions as mean to validate input, which is not what they are intended to do. I suggest replacing your assertions with exceptions and to map those to SOAP faults instead.

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Catching Throwables implies catching Errors in addition to Exceptions, which is considered to be a bad practice as Errors usually indicate a fatal situation (i.e. out of memory or the like) that you don't want to communicate to the client.
I think that you're using assertions as mean to validate input, which is not what they are intended to do. I suggest replacing your assertions with exceptions and to map those to SOAP faults instead.

Thanks for your reply Tareq; I'm using assertions to capture logical errors within my code (i.e. "this should just never happen" things) rather than validating inputs; for the latter I throw exceptions and map them to specific SOAP Faults.

All of which seems a perfectly valid approach, but short of politely requesting the ability to catch throwables in future versions of Spring-WS, I guess there's not much to be done about it for now.